


You Become the Neighborhood

by scioscribe



Category: Get Out (2017)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 11:31:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17786549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: It was like there was some kind of poisonous gas hovering in him, like what you got in a mine when you dug too deep, and sex with Rod burned it all away and made the air clear and breathable again.They hadn’t been talking about it, though.  They’d been talking about pod people, Rod’s latest thing.  Pod people and gentrification.





	You Become the Neighborhood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



> Title shamelessly stolen from a Glen Hirshberg short story.

“Now to my way of thinking it’s like witches and their motherfucking gingerbread houses,” Rod said, tapping the car window.  It had fogged up a little with how long they’d been sitting out there and his fingertip left a clear splotch behind.  “You know?  They lure you in.  They like, ‘Hey, unsuspecting brothers, here’s a cupcake shop, you like cupcakes, don’t you?  Who the fuck doesn’t?’ and then, boom, the whole neighborhood’s gone.  I mean, it’s there, but it’s gone.”

“The soul of the place,” Chris said.

“Yeah.  And that’s the way this shit works, time after time after time.  You come in for the good stuff and then bam.  And _that’s_ why all these little Victorian places with those gables and lacy shit, it’s all gingerbread and gumdrops, _that’s_ gentrification in a fucking nutshell.”  He turned the see-through spot on the window into a heart, tracing it with one finger.  “You like that?  Happy Valentine’s Day.”

Chris leaned in, rubbing his shoulder against Rod’s.  “Yeah.  Happy Valentine’s Day, man.  Still getting used to it.”

They were waiting on new IDs.  Their last set had gotten maybe-compromised back in Atlanta, where they’d spent three days and a hell of a lot of camera flashes trying to reverse a Coagula procedure, their fifth try so far.  That whole creepy-ass order was after them, not to mention everybody who had questions about what had happened out at the Armitage house, and they wanted to keep moving.  Needed to keep moving.  Like if he sat still for too long he’d wake up back in that chair, the leather on the armrests tougher this time, not cracking open underneath his fingernails.  He’d wake up in the Sunken Place.

Rod had gone on the run with him without even saying a word about it.  They’d swung back through Brooklyn and picked up Sid and his food and then they’d hit the road, Chris sleeping with Sid curled up on his thighs, snuffling against his jeans.  The nightmares were gray and watery and far away, which had made them worse.  And they weren’t gone—yet or ever.

But the sex helped.  It was like there was some kind of poisonous gas hovering in him, like what you got in a mine when you dug too deep, and sex with Rod burned it all away and made the air clear and breathable again.

They hadn’t been talking about it, though.  They’d been talking about pod people, Rod’s latest thing.  Pod people and gentrification.

“You’re used to me,” Rod said now.  “You woke up in the middle of the night and I was some milkweed fluff-filled motherfucker, you’d know it.”

Chris shivered and reached over to put his hand on Rod’s thigh.  And that was another thing they hadn’t done before, not outside of a bedroom.  But he liked it.  Soft and sturdy and warm.  “Don’t say shit like that.  I don’t even want to think about it.”

Rod looked down at Chris’s hand.  A good smile broke across his face.  “I won’t, then.”

“Thank you.”

“So what you want to do for Valentine’s Day once we’re other people?  If this is that kind of thing.”

“This is every kind of thing,” Chris said.  He could hear the intensity in his voice, a metallic crackle like tinfoil crumpling up.

Nothing about this was fair.  He hadn’t meant for Rod to wind up in this shit—his whole life thrown into a fucking meat grinder, Chris the only person there—but he couldn’t think about going it alone.  He needed him.

He cleared his throat.  “So dinner.  I was thinking dinner.”

Rod was still smiling.  “Dinner sounds good.”

Somebody knocked on the window.  Sid stirred in his bed in the backseat long enough to issue a cursory warning bark before tucking back into a circle.

Rod rolled the window down.  “Man, you almost had to inconvenience yourself having to call 911 for me having a fucking heart attack right here.”

The dude snickered.  “Yeah, y’all look pretty preoccupied.”  He nodded at Chris’s hand, which was right where he’d left it and which had only tightened up since the knock.

Dammit, he didn’t even trust other black people anymore, not without getting a chance to flash some light in their eyes, which he couldn’t do all the time.  He couldn’t help being jumpy.  It wasn’t paranoia if there really were a bunch of country club assholes running around out there with their pretty china tea-sets and prettier china doll daughters, their faux black gardeners and lover-boys in tweed.

“Yeah,” Rod said, “there’s some high quality gay energy bouncing around in here, we get it.”

The dude passed them the envelope.  “I’m down with it.”

Chris took the envelope and shuffled the IDs around.  Driver’s licenses—always two driver’s licenses, now.  Rod was sanding the rougher edges off of his driving, or trying to, and a license was less conspicuous than state ID.

“These look good.  You think if we swing back through here in a couple weeks, you could have some passports ready for us?”

The dude shook his head.  “I don’t fuck around with border security, man.”

“You know anybody who does?”

“Might.  I could ask around.  Y’all be here tomorrow night?”

Rod looked over at Chris.  Chris had been the one making the call to move every night, or at least every night when they weren’t tucked up in some storage unit trying to camera-flash somebody back into their own brain for good.  He hadn’t liked the idea of staying put, staying findable, other than that.

But he thought about neighborhoods, lived-in places, familiar things.  Knowing somebody and some place well enough that you’d know in your bones if they were different.  And, aside from all that high-minded shit, he thought about how it’d be nice to be settled at least for tonight, to know what city he was looking in for romantic dinner restaurants, instead of trying to pick one on the fly.  To know they’d be back again in that good hotel room with the actual mini-bar and those good sheets that Rod had looked so fine laid out on.

“Sure,” Chris said.  “Tomorrow night’s fine.  You let us know, you got the number.”  That burner’d be good for another couple days at least.

The dude bumped fists with Rod and walked off, nice and casual.

“Let me see them,” Rod said.  Chris showed him the IDs.  “Yeah, you’re right, these are some quality fakes.  Like fool-the-TSA-level fakes and that’s some tricky shit.  We got these and we get the passports and we could maybe even leave the country sometime.  You like the beach?  I feel like a lot of countries that don’t have extradition have beaches, two points in their favor.”

Chris chuckled.  “Yeah, I like the beach.  I could make money off pictures again there, too.  You know, set up a little stand somewhere, sell to tourists.”  He pocketed the IDs.  “Stop living off Coagula money.”

“We deserve that,” Rod said.  “Any dollar we lift off those Necronomicon-reading Ted Bundy motherfuckers is one hundred percent certified righteous theft.”

“I agree.  I just don’t like touching the same shit they have.”

Rod defogged the windshield and then eased out of their spot.  “They touched you.  Nothing wrong with you.  And I’ve been over every inch of you.”

“Whole lot’s wrong upstairs.”  He exhaled.  Turning his head, he could still see the faint remnant of the heart Rod had drawn on the window, and something quirked in his chest, like the tug of something coming back into alignment.  “But never mind all that.  I want to start looking up restaurants.  Nothing really top-end’s gonna have any tables left for some asshole calling _on_ Valentine’s Day, but I think I can get us up a tier from Applebee’s or Chili’s or whatever.  You want Italian?”

“Some part of me always does.  I could watch that _Goodfellas_ garlic-shaving bit on loop, I’m telling you.”

Chris said, “I do want us to leave someday.  Get as far away from all this as we can.  Go somewhere and forget it all—or almost all of it.”  Not this, he meant.  Not this particular thing, the red-and-blue flicker of lights on Rod’s face in the dark, the first time they fucked in some shitty motel room, the feel of Rod’s cock against his tongue.  “And you can shave garlic every day there if you want.”

He thought about that on loop, Rod’s fingers sure and steady on the razor blade, the garlic peeling off in slices so fine they were almost invisible.  You could watch a person do a thing so many times that it’d look wrong if they did it any other way, if any other person tried to step in their spot.  He figured he’d thought love was all about rescuing but there was this, too, the accumulation of minutes, images enough of the other person in your head that you could fill a whole gallery with them.  Familiarity.  Not a lure but a life.  He’d kept his eyes and that was what he saw, now that he knew how to look.


End file.
